Marisha Pessl’s first novel, the darkly offbeat Special Topics in Calamity Physics, was one of the biggest book releases of 2006, reaping praise from numerous critics, readers at large, and novelist Jonathan Franzen, among others. The story is told from the perspective of Blue van Meer the new girl at a private school who is invited into an exclusive clique known as the “bluebloods”. As Blue becomes more involved in the school she discovers a dark secret. Pessl composed the book as a “syllabus” for a course, with each chapter named after a famous author, a delightful structural device supporting the novel’s academic setting.

Pessl is back with Night Film, a genre-blurring suspense novelabout a disgraced reporter investigating the apparent suicide of a cult horror film director’s daughter. The director, Stanislas Cordova, hasn’t been seen in public for years, and even more worrying, this isn’t the first mysterious death in the filmmaker’s family. Like she did in Special Topics, Pessl uses a number of unconventional devices to tell her story, like screen captures from websites and copies of notes and letters.